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Possible outcomes

Making a decision

Uphold your complaint and recommend how the organisation should put things right

Uphold only part of your complaint

Uphold your complaint but not make any recommendations because the organisation may have put things right by the time we decide your complaint

Uphold your complaint but not make any recommendations as we consider the fault didn’t have a significant effect on you

Not uphold your complaint

We cannot or will not investigate your complaint

Putting things right

We might ask the organisation to:

apologise to you

provide a service you should have had

make a decision it should have done before

reconsider a decision it did not take properly in the first place

improve its procedures so similar problems do not happen again

make a payment

We do not have legal powers to force organisations we investigate to follow our recommendations, but they almost always do.

Publishing decisions

We publish all decisions three months after the date of the decision, unless we decide it is not in your best interests to do so.

Public interest reports

In a small number of investigations we find issues that other councils and care providers could learn from, or the public should know about. For these we will produce a detailed report of the investigation and publish it. We may also send the report to the media with a press release.

Our decision statements and public interest reports do not reveal your identity or that of the people involved, but do name the organisation investigated.